AMERICAN MORAL EDUCATION: INTRODUCTION

An
important new book, The self beyond itself, critiques
Western ethics. American Jewish philosopher Heidi Ravven argues
that medieval Christianity “went wrong” by adopting the punitive
notion of moral Behavior as DECISIONS based on the “free will” of
autonomous individuals. Ravven returns to the more positive ancient
Greek view of moral Character as the cultivation of good moral
HABITS based on the place of the Self in society and
nature.

This Post
introduces a Series on AMERICAN MORAL EDUCATION – attempts to teach
“values,” mostly in American public schools. This topic may
interest Chinese as China attempts to strengthen its own moral
education.

The Series
will come from the first chapter of a new book on Western ethics, a
chapter on American moral education. This Post introduces the Book
and its Author, Argument, and Problematique. Subsequent Posts will
provide the first Chapter itself.

Overall, a
main point is that recent American approaches to moral education,
despite thinking they are returning to Greek “virtue ethics,”
misinterpret the Greek notion of Character, making it into a matter
of individual DECISIONS instead of social
HABITS.

Another
main point is that this individualist-volitional account of moral
agency PERSONALIZES and DEPOLITICIZES moral discourse, blaming
individuals for misbehavior and social ills while diverting
attention from societal issues of power and justice.

Current
American public culture, both conservative and liberal, assumes an
ethic of individual responsibility. People are supposed to know
right from wrong and, on the basis of their own “free will,” make
DECISIONS to act rightly, almost regardless of circumstances. That
distinctive American moral culture derives from the rest of Western
Christianity, particularly historical American Protestantism. An
important new book – The self beyond itself, by American
Jewish philosopher Heidi Ravven – critiques the entire Latin
Christian ethical tradition. Ravven bases her critique on both
historical-philosphical and modern-scientific grounds.

Historically, Ravven argues that Western Christianity
“went wrong” in Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages when it
adopted and enforced the punitive notion of “free will.” Ravven
advocates instead a return to the more positive ancient Greek view
of moral character as the cultivation of good moral HABITS through
striving to understand the place of the Self in society and nature.
Individuals are strongly embedded in society, and society is
responsible for fostering natural “human flourishing.” That ancient
tradition was last advanced in the 1600s by the Dutch Jewish
philosopher Spinoza, whose insights into the natural emotional
component of healthy human functioning have been largely ignored by
rationalistic Westerners.

Scientifically, there is now increasing evidence that
Aristotle and Spinoza “got it right.” Studies of animals suggest
that “normativity” evolved naturally as part of society. Studies of
human infants suggest that, from the beginning, they are highly
social. Studies of the determinants of moral or immoral behavior
show that social context matters more than individual character or
“will.” Above all, recent studies of the human brain reveal that
the human “self” relies heavily for its identity and functioning
both on non-conscious habits and on a supportive society. Ravven
argues that rationalistic “free will” is a distinctively Christian
cultural myth. Nevertheless, individuals still strongly identify
with their own actions and can assume responsibility for
them.

Ravven, a
Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College in Central New
York, is a leading proponent of empirically-based ethics. In this
book, she writes accessibly for the general reader, covering a huge
range of topics in plain English and with a light touch. Chinese
should benefit both from her revealing Christian assumptions that
underlie Western “modernity” and from her explaining the relevance
to philosophy and politics of natural and social science. Chinese
may wish to compare Western emphasis on individualism with Chinese
recognition of sociality. Chinese may even be provoked to
reconsider Chinese approaches to moral education, historical and
current.

AUTHOR:
TOWARD EMPIRICAL ETHICS

Heidi M.
Ravven (born 1952) is a neurophilosopher and specialist on the
philosophy of the seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza.
She was the first to argue that Spinoza's moral philosophy is a
systems theory of ethics. Ravven was also the first philosopher to
propose that Spinoza anticipated central discoveries in the
neuroscience of the emotions. Ravven has published widely on
Spinoza's philosophic thought, on the twelfth century philosopher
Moses Maimonides, on G.W.F. Hegel and feminism, and on Jewish
ethics and Jewish feminism.

In 2004
Ravven received an unsolicited $500,000 grant from the Ford
Foundation to write a book rethinking ethics. That book, The
Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain
Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will was published by The New
Press in May 2013. It is an extended and multidisciplinary inquiry
into MORAL AGENCY: why we are moral, why and when we are not, and
how to get people to be more moral. Ravven concludes with her own
theory of moral agency inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, which
she updates to reflect contemporary understandings of how the
brain/mind works in moral thinking and action. The book is
accessibly written for a generally educated audience rather than
just for specialists.

Heidi
Ravven is Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College where
she has taught Jewish Studies since 1983. She holds a Ph.D. from
Brandeis University (1984), she attended Smith College, and is a
1970 graduate of the Commonwealth School, Boston. Ravven is a
founding member of the Society for Empirical Ethics, an
organization devoted to promoting dialogue among philosophers,
neurobiologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and other social
and natural scientists about ethics. She has been active in the
Academy for Jewish Philosophy, the International Neuroethics
Society, the North American Spinoza Society, and is a member of the
American Philosophical Association, the Association for Jewish
Studies, the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, and
the Society for Jewish Ethics.

Heidi
Ravven has written extensively on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.
Her articles appear in a number of journals and several have been
republished in anthologies. Ravven believes that Spinoza’s
philosophy is the best starting point for trying to integrate the
evidence emerging from the new brain sciences into a viable model
of the basic moral brain, the optimal route to its development, and
the implications of such a view for how social, legal, political,
and other institutions and practices might to be redesigned. Ravven
is now engaged in writing a book accessible to a generally educated
audience on the relevance of Spinoza, called The Return of
Spinoza. (For further Reading, see the Wikipedia article on
Ravven, from which the sections here on Author and Argument are
excepted.)

ARGUMENT:
FREE WILL AS CULTURAL CONSTRUCT

In The
Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain
Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will Heidi Ravven challenges
the idea of free will. Attributing free will to human beings means
that human beings have the capacity to rise above both nature and
nurture and even current situation to be good people and choose to
act ethically. This capacity to choose our actions—to rise above
our genetic inheritance whatever it might be, above our upbringing
no matter how terrible it was, and above our present situation
despite its social pressures—is what is meant by “free will.” We do
moral acts for moral reasons, for no other fully determining
reasons, and out of no other fully determining causes—such as brain
modules, group pressures, or upbringing. And that is why we can be
held morally responsible.

Ravven
argues that this view is false and also that it is a cultural
belief particular to the Western world. She traces the belief in
free will to a theological myth and notion of human nature, and
exposes the origins of the idea of free will in the Christian
theology of the Latin West originating in the Church Father St.
Augustine. She describes how that theology became secularized so
that many today are unaware than free will presupposes a human
person beyond nature and environment who can intervene as if from
above (like an all-powerful God).

Ravven
turns to search the new brain sciences to discover new ways that
moral agency could be rethought without free will. She concludes
that there are three factors that together determine action: nature
(biology, etc.), nurture (biography, history, culture, language
(etc.), and present situation (social belonging and its demands,
incentives, and disincentives, and the like). So the most effective
way of changing individual behavior is to intervene in social and
cultural and familial systems at every scale. Promoting and
bolstering diversity and whistle blowing within all these systems
is vital to combating the tendencies to Groupthink that human
nature makes us all too prone to. For we are social and contextual
beings--our brains have evolved that way. Nevertheless, as Spinoza
anticipated, an arduous path of the education of desire can lead to
independence of mind from the tyranny of the immediate local world
for those who undertake it. We can learn to be good even if we
cannot freely choose to be good.

PROBLEMATIQUE: HUMAN MORAL NATURE [Introduction to
Chapter One]

Why are
some people ethical and others unethical? How do people become
ethical or unethical? Do people sometimes act in ethical ways and
at other times act in quite unethical ways? How can that happen?
Are there situations and times when people tend to act in
ethical ways and other times when they tend to act
unethically? How can we get people to be more ethical and more
consistently ethical? How can we get ourselves to be better people
and act more ethically more of the time? These are the questions I
address in this book. Philosophers refer to these questions and
related ones as the problem of “moral agency.” This book is about
moral agency. I look at the problem of moral agency—how we become
moral (and immoral) and why we act morally and immorally—from many
different perspectives. I circle around it, exploring different
ways of thinking and rethinking what our experience of being
ethical is all about—especially where our ethical capacity comes
from, how it develops, and finally how to strengthen it and put it
to best use.

One fairly
popular idea among some scientists and philosophers looking to
discover where our moral sense comes from is to search for an
ethical module in the human brain. These brain scientists set out
to discover and locate a special innate ethical capacity in the
brain. They conjecture that some of us inherit a more effective
ethical brain than others—that is, some of us are born with a
strong moral brain capacity and others with a weak one. Other
scientists and philosophers conjecture that perhaps some of us use
and develop our ethical capacity better than others. These folks
ask what certain people do to become better at being ethical than
others. So some scientists and philosophers regard the variation as
primarily between individuals because of an innate difference,
while others chalk up the difference to how people are brought up.
Still others raise the question of the effects upon moral agency of
present context and situation, proposing that our moral capacity
may be more about context and group behavior than about
individuals.

The most
common assumptions in the United States and the West more generally
about the human moral capacity differ from the innate moral module
view (nature) and also from the individual or social training view
(nurture) just outlined. The view most prevalent among people all
around us (and also nearly universally held by philosophers till
very recently) is that we have free will. The free will view goes
like this: we might have a brain that has certain biological
tendencies toward good or bad, and we might have a biography
replete with all kinds of terrible moral models and have suffered
painful and harsh conditions and even abuse, and we might be in
fairly coercive political and social situations and institutions,
yet we all know what doing the right thing is, and we can and ought
to do the right thing no matter what. We can rise above both our
nature and our nurture and even our situation to be good people and
choose to act ethically. This capacity to choose our actions—to
rise above our genetic inheritance whatever it might be, above our
upbringing no matter how terrible it was, and above our present
situation despite its social pressures—is what we mean by “free
will.” On this account, we are all capable of being good, and we
are all equally capable of it because we are all human.
Being human means that we can freely choose the good over the bad
no matter what hand nature or nurture has dealt us. The choice
is completely our own. Our actions have no other origin, no
other ultimate causes, than ourselves as free agents. Even if we
are somewhat shaped by our hardships, by our luck, or even by our
brains, nevertheless we still have a sacrosanct core of free will
that we can use to rise above all of that and be moral beings.
We do moral acts for moral reasons, for no other reasons, and
out of no other fully determining causes—such as brain modules,
group pressures, or upbringing. And that is why we can be and ought
to be held morally responsible for what we do and for what we fail
to do. This free will story, about how and why we are moral and
also at times fail to be moral, is everywhere around us. It
probably seems and feels absolutely obvious and obviously true as
you read my account of it here. But the evidence from the new brain
sciences is amassing that the free will account of the nature and
origin of our ethical capacity, of our moral agency, is in fact
false, or at least highly unlikely; at best it may work that way in
some rare individuals, who are probably philosophers.

In this
book I argue that it is not obvious that human beings have free
will, as we like to believe, in the way that it is obvious that we
have hands and feet and noses; instead, free will is a cultural
assumption. And it is an assumption that turns out to be false. I
make the case that, rather than serving as a description of human
beings in general, free will is a particularly American and Western
way of conceiving human nature. Even though it feels natural
to us, the belief in free will is actually conventional and
provincial. While we generally believe that this way of thinking
about our moral nature is universally human, an account of human
nature—everyone knows that we have “free will,” that all human
beings experience this inner freedom and lay their claim to moral
virtue or sin and to the right to praise or blame upon the basis of
that freedom—it turns out that most other cultures have no notion
of free will. They base their understandings of human moral nature
on different cultural assumptions. They conceive both human nature
and the human place in the universe quite differently from the way
we do. The belief in free will is actually part of a larger story,
a story we take for granted or have even forgotten. Other cultures
have different stories. We are as culturally provincial as they
are, for ours is just one way among many of thinking about the
human moral capacity and human nature generally. One of the aims of
this book is to expose the free will account of moral agency as a
mere cultural assumption and inheritance. I argue that when we
interpret our moral agency in terms of having freedom of the will,
we are not discovering in our inner experience of ourselves
something all human beings share, but instead are
discovering cultural assumptions that deeply and implicitly shape
the ways we envision our place in the universe. The notion of free
will is based on a theological story whose religious origin and
meaning we often tend to be unaware of and which some of us even
explicitly reject. Nonetheless, the standard Western theological
vision of the human place in the universe still has an implicit and
quite pervasive hold over us. The belief in free will, I recount at
considerable length in Chapter Four, has a unique history that more
or less began at one time—in early Latin Christianity—and was
widely disseminated through authoritative thinkers who worked to
make it sacrosanct and to delegitimize and even outlaw other points
of view advocated by other individuals and groups. The
presupposition of free will has been embodied in our institutions,
practices, and laws and transmitted for hundreds of years by
systems of education. These practices and institutions, with their
implicit notion of human moral agency, still govern our lives to a
great extent in the West and especially in the United States. And
that is why they feel natural and universal when they are really,
instead, the products of a particular cultural point of view and
hence peculiar to ourselves.

Once we
have uncovered our own standard and ubiquitous cultural
presuppositions about our moral capacity, we can begin to discover
where they come from. We can also question their validity by
looking at the new brain sciences to see if they are borne out. And
we can turn to explore other ideas from other cultures to open our
minds to different ways of thinking about why people act ethically
and why they don’t, and why and when they think they can hold both
themselves and others morally responsible. Can we learn anything
from other cultures? How can we revise our own cultural conception
of moral agency to reflect new and better understandings of how the
brain works? Our first aim here, in this chapter, is to expose our
deep presuppositions about how and why we come to act ethically and
unethically. Then in the next chapter we shall turn to test cases,
those of perpetrators and rescuers in the Nazi Holocaust, to
determine whether the standard assumptions we hold about free will
moral agency can explain either the evil of the perpetrators, the
virtue of the rescuers, or the passivity of the
bystanders.

In order
to tease out our standard beliefs about moral agency, I begin, in
this first chapter, with an investigation of moral education in
America from colonial times to the present. I chose this starting
point for my research on moral agency because I thought that how we
as a society teach our children to be moral will expose our basic
assumptions about our moral capacity, how we generally believe we
can get our kids to become good people. Here we have our own
cultural answer to Socrates’s famous question in the Meno:
can virtue be taught? Americans have always believed that virtue
can be taught, and taught in school as well as in church and
at home in the family. I discovered that from our early beginnings
to today, the ubiquitous assumption is that our moral capacity
rests on free will, albeit a free will that needs some training in
the classroom and in the home. I began with the present. The
widespread introduction of (moral) character education into public
schools since the 1980s makes it the predominant contemporary form
in which children are instructed in ethics in the United States. I
met with several of the leading proponents of the movement; I read
lots of the books and articles pertaining to this movement; and,
with the help of professional advice, I selected several
elementary, middle, and high schools to go to so that I could
observe their programs in character education. What I discovered
was fascinating.

Heidi M.
Ravven is a Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College in
Central New York. She is a leading proponent of basing ethical
philosophy on empirical studies of how human beings actually
function, particularly as revealed by current
neuroscience.

Ravven has
published widely on Jewish philosphers Spinoza and Maimonides and
on Jewish ethics and Jewish feminism. Ravven’s 2013 book The
Self Beyond Itself explores Moral Agency: why we are moral, why
and when we are not, and how to get people to be more
moral.

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韦爱德Edwin A. Winckler (韦爱德) is an American political scientist (Harvard BA, MA, and PhD) who has taught mostly in the sociology departments at Columbia and Harvard. He has been researching China for a half century, publishing books about Taiwan’s political economy (Sharpe, 1988), China’s post-Mao reforms (Rienner, 1999), and China’s population policy (Stanford, 2005, with Susan Greenhalgh). Recently he has begun also explaining American politics to Chinese. So the purpose of this Blog is to call attention to the best American media commentary on current American politics and to relate that to the best recent American academic scholarship on American politics. Winckler’s long-term institutional base remains the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York City. However he and his research have now retreated to picturesque rural Central New York.